Geographies of Change is a project which draws a new geography made up of places where organizations of different nature and origin are carrying out practices of real sustainability in the most diverse fields and sectors of the collectivity. Geographies of Change maps this movement into the form of a participative online archive.

The current process of transformation of every aspect of our life towards a higher level of individual and social responsibility, developed by the projects included in this constantly updated map and by many others not yet included, is thus made visible and above all accessible and therefore open to opportunities for connections and collaborations.

Since 2003, when at Cittadellarte we started to systematically catalogue responsible practices in their different declinations around the world, the global movement of social awareness has reached a wider and wider scope of individuals, communities and institutions.

The project Geographies of Change maps this movement into the form of a participative online archive which intends to be a utility contributing to achieving two strategic global objectives: making public, visible and usable the common good represented by the concrete experiences already active in the world, and facilitating connections, both within this geography and among its hubs and any other civil society organization with which to build bridges and collaboration paths.

Created by Cittadellarte and the University of Ideas as a platform for research and action, it aims at being an open project in progress, generated by the users themselves: everybody is invited to position themselves within this geography and to explore it experimenting its potential in the context of their own research and practice.

The ultimate goal of the Geographies of Change is making more obvious, shared, incisive and deep the impact of the practices aiming at changing our societies towards more responsible cohabitation models with ourselves and the planet. Each of us is invited to consider assuming a role which goes beyond being a member of a hypothetical democratic society and activating themselves as agents of change. At Cittadellarte, we have developed an articulated narrative and an hands-on implementation model for this process: we started off by reflecting within the open laboratory of the University of Ideas on the undelivered dream of democracy (rule of the people, from ancient Greek Demos and Cratos) and on the instituting power embedded in daily practices enacted by all kinds of organizations. Each of them constitutes an actual microstate, with its legislative and governing bodies: they perform practices by means of which they actually express power. Thus we coined the term Demopraxy, by which we mean this more effective and actual declination of an old and never accomplished dream, that of Democracy.

Cittadellarte is a new model of artistic and cultural institution which places art in direct interaction with the different sectors of society, in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation through creative ideas and projects.

Michelangelo Pistoletto's symbol Rebirth is an elaboration of the mathematical sign for infinity. The two opposite circles represent nature and artifice, the central circle is the conjunction of the two and represents the womb of rebirth.
Take part too: www.terzoparadiso.org

It's a series of experimental walks anchored in the specific geography, local knowledge and political conditions of Puerto Rico.

Walking Seminar is a series of experimental walks anchored in the specific geography, local knowledge, emerging art practices, and social and political conditions of Puerto Rico. The island’s exuberant tropical ecology coexists with environmental devastation, institutional mimesis and decay, militarised and post-military spaces, as well as a growing movement to understand and transform these conditions. We are interested in the ways in which abstract political concepts have real physical, material and social traces and in the sensorial apprehension of these manifestations. Over the course of three weeks we follow a loosely defined route and sleep outdoors in hammocks. Sometimes sessions feel like poetic ethnography, at other times like a wandering discussion, and yet others as a sensorial political experiment. There is always another implicit task to sessions, which is to find new pedagogical forms, ways of working collectively and thinking about the future. Because of land management and ownership issues and the amount of land devoted to the US military, or patrolled as a border, sleeping outdoors is for the most part illegal. Understanding, exploring and challenging these imposed limits is an important part of the seminar. As we walk, we are also interested in the poetic and the irrational. We sleep and dream outdoors and temporarily disarm ourselves of the social and political language which organises experience and makes everything outside of it invisible.

About the artist

Santiago Muñoz is an artist and co-founder of Beta-Local. Her work arises out of long periods of observation, in which the camera is present as an object with social implications and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her recent work has to do with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and speculative futures. The Walking Seminars are a way of practising new ways of living, imagining futures, and paying attention together, to a place that is more controlled than lived.